Thank you for buying this record. What follows is its documentation: the pressing identified, the matrix / runout transcribed by hand from the dead wax, and the condition as assessed before it was listed. It is yours to keep with the record.

— Paul, Vinyl Curator

Louis Armstrong And Eddie Condon

At Newport

1956 · Columbia CL 931 · Mono · US · LP · 33 1/3 RPM

Pressing details

Label	Columbia
Catalogue number	CL 931
Year	1956
Mono / Stereo	Mono
Country	US
Format	LP
Speed	33 1/3 RPM
Genre	Jazz - Dixieland/Traditional Jazz
Producer	George Avakian
Performer / Orchestra	Louis Armstrong And His All-Stars; Eddie Condon And His All-Stars
Musicians	Louis Armstrong (trumpet, vocals), Trummy Young (trombone), Edmond Hall (clarinet), Billy Kyle (piano), Barrett Deems (drums), bass uncredited on the labels - Louis Armstrong And His All-Stars; Wild Bill Davison (cornet), Cutty Cutshall or Lou McGarity (trombone), Peanuts Hucko or Edmond Hall (clarinet), Bud Freeman (tenor sax), Gene Schroeder (piano), Eddie Condon (guitar), Cliff Leeman (drums) - Eddie Condon And His All-Stars

Matrix / Runout

Side A:  XLP 39086-1B * 11AA
Side B:  XLP 39087-1D *

Condition

Cover: NM
Vinyl: VG+

Variant chronology

1956 - US Columbia CL 931, six-eye deep-groove mono label  <- this copy
1956 - US Columbia CL 931, six-eye mono promo issue (white label, not for sale)
1956 - Canada Columbia CL 931, six-eye mono
1956 - UK Philips BBL.7151
1956 - Netherlands/Norway Philips B 07206 L
1957 - Australia Coronet KLP 571
n.d. - Argentina/Uruguay Columbia 8073 / 8.073
n.d. - Japan Columbia PL 5045 / XLP 39086
n.d. - South Africa CBS ALD 6126, reissue

This Pressing

1956 Columbia CL 931 mono - six-eye deep-groove label, an original six-eye pressing of this catalogue number.

The Album

Recorded live at the American Jazz Festival in Newport, Rhode Island on July 5 and 6, 1956, this record documents two distinct bands sharing a single festival bill rather than a true collaboration between its two namesakes. Louis Armstrong's All-Stars, by this point a seasoned touring unit built around Trummy Young, Edmond Hall and Billy Kyle, run through a set of Armstrong staples and a Dixieland-arranged reading of a then-current Broadway hit sung by Armstrong himself. Eddie Condon, the guitarist and bandleader whose career stretched back to 1920s Chicago jazz, leads his own rotating cast of swing and Dixieland veterans including cornetist Wild Bill Davison and tenor saxophonist Bud Freeman through a parallel set of blues and standards. The pairing captures the informal, competitive camaraderie of Newport's earliest years, when festival producers booked contrasting working bands back to back rather than staging all-star jam sessions. Armstrong was already the music's most visible ambassador by the mid-1950s, and his All-Stars' festival sets were treated as annual events worth documenting on record, while Condon represented an older, scrappier New York-Chicago lineage of small-group jazz. Together the two sides offer a snapshot of mid-1950s traditional jazz as a living, touring music rather than a museum piece, with each leader's band in comfortable command of its own repertoire.

Tracklist

Side 1

1. Indiana (Back Home Again In Indiana)
2. A Theme From The Threepenny Opera (Mack The Knife) - vocal: Louis Armstrong
3. Whispering
4. Bugle Blues
5. Ole Miss

Side 2

1. Bye An' Bye (Spiritual)
2. Squeeze Me
3. Struttin' With Some Barbecue
4. I Want A Big Butter And Egg Man

The Label

Both sides carry the classic red Columbia six-eye label: a white serif “COLUMBIA” arc across the top, three camera-eye devices set in black segments on each side of the rim, cream and black lettering, and a circled “Lp” logo at the foot, with “NONBREAKABLE” and “MADE IN U.S.A.” rim text and no ring-band slogan. The record is a deep-groove pressing, the construction Columbia used on its six-eye releases before phasing deep groove out toward the end of the decade. This combination - a six-eye label with no CBS overprint on a deep-groove pressing - places the record within Columbia's original six-eye, deep-groove manufacturing window for this catalogue number, ahead of the later flat-label and CBS-overprinted six-eye pressings of the same title.

Fidelity

This is a mono live recording from the 1956 Newport festival, cut for Columbia's standard six-eye era mastering rather than any audiophile process, so the sound reflects the limitations of remote location recording of the period with reasonable balance but limited depth next to Columbia's contemporary studio jazz dates. Collectors on the forums generally regard the original six-eye mono pressing as the most authentic and best-sounding configuration of this title, since no audiophile vinyl reissue of this specific album exists. The only later variant of note is a 1990s CD box remaster, which offers cleaner surfaces but a different equalization rather than a vinyl-cutting improvement over this pressing.

Notes

1956 Columbia CL 931 mono, six-eye deep-groove first-issue label design. The deep groove on both sides and the six-eye label with no CBS overprint place manufacture within Columbia's original deep-groove six-eye window for this catalogue number. The matrix suffixes read from this copy (-1B on side one, -1D on side two) sit within the early alphabetic stamper range rather than the far-advanced letter combinations that mark later six-eye repressings.

Documenting collections

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